Ecological State
Description
Austin Wade Smith:
"Defining the “state” of a place is a way of formulating the present as an accumulation of events from the past. Like the process of bearing witness, ecological state is a testament to the wellbeing of a place, a people, a social fabric. It is a reflection of its extinctions and resurgences, its exposure and patterns of regeneration in a form coherent to prompt action and response. Despite the profound complexity at the heart of ecology and all living systems more broadly, the wellbeing of the planet is not unfathomable. To define and hold the state of the living world, is to make a kind of attestation. Doing so builds an important point of contact within the challenge of legibility. Ecological state is a form of knowing the wellbeing of the living world which is legible and thus actionable within anthropogenic systems like law, economy, policy, information technology, etc. It is an interface through which different worlds can touch, and upon which action can be orchestrated. Rather than a convergent process, the expression of ecological state can be an exploratory process. Let there be a renaissance of interfaces through which the living world exerts pressure on anthropogenic systems.
DAOs could be powerful assemblages of social, ecological, and technical relationships which own and steward the state of a given territory, ecosystem, and bioregion. This is because the protocols, (or perhaps we might call them rituals?), through which communities gather and cohere ecological state requires coordination and governance across diverse domains. This premise is not unfamiliar. Certifications like Organic and Fair trade face similar challenges when they make attestations about the conditions in which a good is grown or produced. The terms are capitalized as proper nouns, because there is a process, through which a claim is made. The methods through which data and experience are structured as information, formalized into situated knowledge, and ultimately made actionable as ecological state should be owned and governed by the inhabitants of a particular territory. Whoever owns or governs these standards controls the point of contact between ecological wellbeing and the different infrastructural and technical regimes which coordinate our lives. This interface becomes a coordination point for all kinds of interactions.
The rituals by which DAOs define and update ecological state are a response to the dilemmas of access and use. These patterns are not unfamiliar to commons rooted in plants, water, and minerals, because ecological states must be owned and governed like the living systems in which they are situated, and to which they refer. Ostrom explicitly states that both informatic and biophysical commons are shared resources prone to social dilemmas. In the case of ecological state protocols, communities govern the means by which they form a coherent understanding of place through diverse and imperfect means. This process of overcoming complex inputs and incentives to create reliable consensus is a variant on a problem sometimes referred to as an oracle problem. DAOs can be a critical means through which communities own and govern oracles of ecological state, in order to orchestrate action, value, policy at a bioregional / territorial level. Making the complex and entangled state of a bioregion legible to political, economic, and informatic systems, without reducing them solely to the logic of any one of those systems, is essential in combating terra nullius. While rituals and protocols to cohere and maintain state may feel like a foreign concept to broader legacies of mutualism and environmental intimacy, the convergence of informatic, social, and ecological processes is in fact the point.
Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction."
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg)